Hospital Workers Sharing Music? They May Also Be Sharing Your Medical Records

Health care workers using Gnutella or other peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to share music and video, may be putting you at risk for medical identity theft, Dartmouth researchers find.

If Pres. Obama has his way, the medical records of every American will be digitized by 2014. The stimulus package (read the text here) includes $19 billion in funding to pay for the effort and calls for the appointment of a chief privacy officer to advise the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on how best to protect this sensitive information. If a new study of how easily your medical records can be found online by others is any indication, the new chief privacy officer (to be appointed over the next 12 months) will have his work cut out for him because an increase in digital medical records would likely mean an increase in medical identity theft.

Using software written specifically for scanning Internet-based peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, Eric Johnson, an operations management professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in Hanover, N.H., and colleagues recently found confidential medical files, involving thousands of people, including patient billing records and insurance claims containing Social Security numbers, birth dates, medical diagnoses and psychiatric evaluations. (The same type of information could have been found without the special search software, although not as quickly because the researchers would have had to search individual computers on each of the P2P networks they visited.)